SEC Pressed to Require Climate-Risk Disclosures

One of the industries considered most vulnerable to climate change is the insurance industry, with shifting weather patterns threatening property in the nation’s most hurricane-prone areas.

Yet in its 345-page annual financial report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission this year, Allstate, which insures one out of every eight homes in the United States, did not mention climate change, global warming, greenhouse gases or carbon dioxide.

Exxon Mobil made only scant mention of the issue in its SEC filings. “The operations and earnings of the Corporation and its affiliates throughout the world have been, and may in the future be, affected from time to time in varying degree by political and legal factors,” it said. It listed climate regulation as one factor. Now a group of state officials, state pension fund managers and environmental organizations are pressing the SEC to force all public companies to come up with something more useful to investors. Among those who signed the formal petition were Bill Lockyer, California treasurer; Alex Sink, Florida’s chief financial officer; and Richard Moore, North Carolina treasurer. In the petition, to be filed today, the group is asking the commission to require companies to assess and disclose their financial risks from climate change and legislation.

“The SEC exists to make sure that investors have the information that they need to make smart decisions,” said Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, a group that promotes environmental standards among private companies. Ceres and the Calvert Group, an asset management firm, said in a January report that more than half of the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index “are doing a poor job of disclosing climate change risk.”

Environmental groups have written to the SEC twice before without receiving a response. They said that by filing a formal petition, they hoped to prod the SEC to act.

Washington Post